A Nissan for £84,450? Such notions would once have seemed ridiculous, but the company has always dabbled in sports cars and the 240Z retains a proportional elegance that belies its 43 years. Even so, there was a time when a special edition Nissan was unlikely to amount to much more than a couple of Starsky & Hutch stripes on the flanks of your Sunny.

In recent years, the advent of driving simulators has caused many a teenage boy to develop the same kind of crush on harder-edged Nissans – the Skyline, in particular – that those of a certain age (me, then) used to feel for Sunbeam Tigers or Aston Martin DB4s.

The company’s latest sporting statement is the GT-R Track Pack, an appropriate companion for the return trip from the Nürburgring 24 Hours given that much of the development work was conducted at the circuit. The design brief was to create a car that was even faster, lighter and firmer than its progenitor.

There are a few styling differences between this and an “ordinary” GT-R, but most owe something to function as well as form. The six-spoke alloy wheels, for instance, save 10kg. As such details – and the name – suggest, this is a car aimed at trackday aficionados. The seats are covered in a special fabric that helps drivers stick to seats during hard cornering, but it is not so rigid as to make long road journeys intolerable (the suspension can be softened at the flick of a switch).

Road noise is acceptable on all but the most poorly surfaced Belgian motorways – and all cars makes a racket on those. Uneven road surfaces send occasional jolts through the cabin, but it’s nothing like as wearing as the GT-R’s silhouette implies.